I don't get the question. If it is, do I update all buckets every week, the answer is no. The beauty of the system is that I put stuff in a bucket, back it up twice, and don't worry about updating it, generally.

New versions of old derivative files go in the current bucket, not the old one.

I'm only backing up changes to CR settings in DNG files like twice a year. Generally, any time I change the CR settings of a previously converted DNG file, it';s because I am making a derivative, Master file. In these cases, I will generally not be returnning to the RAw again, since I have not put a bunch of work into the new Master. So these are generally only getting backed up at the time of drive migration.

I'll be working on some cool new trick for backing up RAW file settings over the next six months...stay tuned.

You answered the question correctly. Since buckets are just folders, it's very easy to create a single backup mirror job that basically mirrors the entire partition or disk containing all the buckets weekly. By doing this, you are free to make all the changes you want to earlier buckets (e.g. ACR adjustments, new or changed keywords, master derivative changes), and know those changes will get backed up once a week. Afterall, they are all still linked to in the catalog...correct? The drawback to this; however, is when you start to get a lot of buckets and the partition or disk begins to fill up, (or worse yet, you have to start adding more drives); the mirror job could then start to take a very long time as it searches through many gigabytes of data looking for what's changed.

It sounds as though you don't concern yourself with this until the next migration because those changes are far and few between, and if they were lost, it wouldn't be that detrimental. And you are right, I guess that is the beauty of the system, even from a backup standpoint, because no matter how big your archive may get, your offsite backup job will never be larger than the current bucket size, and therefore will complete quickly.

I don't recall you covering the backup side of DAM from this standpoint in your book other than discussing burning DVD's, and so that's why I asked. If I did overlook this in the book, or maybe it was implied and I just missed that, please let me know. I'm going through it a second time now, but am only about half way done.

Part of the whole process of deciding how to present the information was determining how far to go into everything. Essentially this informs the system, but I don't go into it in an explanation.

There are two principle benefits to doing things this way.

The first is that you reduce the opportunity for corruption of the file propagating through the backups. Every time you mount a hard drive backup and resync a lager number of files, you might be overwriting good files with corrupted ones (it's happened to me before). The DNG converter can help you determine file inttegrity, but running it on 140,000 files weekly seems like overkill...

The second benefit of only periodically resyncing the bulk of the files, is that most of them can stay offsite safely in their Halliburton case. Only the most recent Original files drive and Derivative files drive need to come in.

Basically, it's a cost-benefit calculation, and for the choice is clear.

Makes sense, and certainly makes the backup job a lot easier. It does boil down to a cost-benefit calculation.

Just curious though, have you ever, or do you ever think there may come a time when you need to make a global ACR adjustment or some other modification to your entire archive or even a large majority of them due to some new ACR feature or discovery, or just newly acquired knowledge?If so, I would assume you would do a re-sync in that case.

Dan,Absolutely. One such instance is the conversion to DNG. I have been retroactively converting the first files from 2005 to DNG, and that has meant working back through them, applying ratings and different Camera Raw settings than what they were originally saved with.

And once I make a firmer decision about Proof sharpening in DNG, I could see that I might want to go back through and adjust a large number (say, all 1 star and higher) images to a higher sharpening. I will not be doing any more than absolutely necessary at the moment however, since I'm nnot sure it really pays me back all that much at the present time.